Unaware he’d ignited her fuse, the staffer proceeded to send her straight into orbit. “If Global’s power structure thought the ambassador was going to undercut them on the fat embassy security contract they’re trying to land, they might want him out of the picture. When I called Nikki, though, she assured me…”
“Whoa! Back up a minute. Did you just say you called Nikki?” Gina asked incredulously. “Nicole Tremayne? My boss?”
“Of course I called her. She appreciates the business we’ve sent TTG’s way since you and the ambassador…uh…” He caught the duchess’s warning glance. “Since you and the ambassador started seeing each other. But I knew she didn’t understand the awkward position you put him in by enticing him to attend an event sponsored by Global.”
Gina barely heard the last, insulting remark. She was still dealing with the shock of learning that Jack and his staff had funneled business to TTG.
Her pride crumbled. Like an old, rotted rowboat, it just fell apart right before her eyes. What a fool she was! All these weeks she’d thought, she’d actually believed, she was making her own mark at TTG.
She struggled to her feet. She refused to burst into tears in front of Vickers, but her throat was thick when she reminded the assembled group that Special Agent Driskell and her partner were expected at any moment.
“Sarah, would you show them in when they get here? I need to… I need to…”
She didn’t trust herself to finish. With a vague gesture toward the arched hallway leading to the rear of the apartment, she turned on her heel. Her eyes were burning by the time she made it the bath linking her bedroom with Sarah’s old room. She dropped the lid to the stool and sank down sideways, crossing both arms on the counter beside it.
Strangely, the tears didn’t gush. Gina stared at the wall, her pride in shreds, and waited for the usual flood to burst through the dam. It took a moment for her to understand why the tsunami didn’t happen.
None of it mattered. Not her job or TTG or Vickers’s snide comments. The only thing that mattered right now was Jack’s safety. She would eat crow or humble pie or black, slimy worms if that would bring him back to her.
She was still staring blankly at the wall when Sarah tapped on the bathroom door.
“Gina? Are you okay?”
“Mostly.”
“May I come in?”
She mumbled an assent and almost lost it when her sister eased down onto her knees beside the stool. Gina had counted on Sarah to bail her out of so many of life’s little catastrophes. Turned to her, too, to soothe the ruffled feathers of the men she’d fallen for, then dropped with such careless abandon.
“It’ll be okay,” Sarah murmured, stroking her hair. “It’ll be okay. Judging by everything I’ve heard in the past few minutes, Jack’s been in tight spots before. He’ll find a way out of this one, too.”
* * *
Halfway across town Jack was was hungry, hurting and totally pissed.
He’d been sitting on his ass for hours now in a wobbly chair with one leg shorter than the other. His arms were twisted behind his back. Plastic restraints cut into his wrists. The wound from the bullet that had grazed his upper arm had scabbed over, but the trail of dried blood it left itched like the devil under the shirt and suit coat he’d been told to pull on before they’d departed his hotel suite.
Jack had complied with the order. Hell, with Dominic St. Sebastian cradling an unconscious Gina in his arms, Jack would have jumped out the eighth-story window if so ordered to prevent the bastard from hurting her any worse.
He’d had time these past hours to think about that, though. How fast St. Sebastian had put himself between Gina and his two pals with guns. How quickly he’d clipped her, then caught her before she hit the floor. As though he wanted to neutralize her and get her out of the picture immediately, before the other goons turned their weapons in her direction.
If so, he hadn’t bothered to communicate his strategy to Jack. Or anything else, for that matter. St. Sebastian and the shorter of his two pals had disappeared right after they’d dumped Jack in this abandoned warehouse.
They’d left the shaved-head Goliath to stand guard. The giant had heaved his bulk up twice in the past six hours, both times to take a leak. He’d sprayed the grimy brick wall like a fire hose, adding his contribution to the stench of vomit, urine and rat feces littering what was obviously a hangout for homeless druggies. He’d also grunted into a cell phone a few times in a heavy dialect Jack couldn’t understand but otherwise refused to say a word.
Shifting in his chair to ease the ache in his shoulder joints, Jack decided to take another shot at him. “Hey! Num nuts! I know you won’t respond to English.”
He tried Spanish again, then French, then his limited Russian. All he got was a sneer and a shake of the thug’s massive head.
Okay. All right. Jack couldn’t wait any longer. If the nine or ten layers of local, state and federal officials he knew had to be looking for him hadn’t closed in on the warehouse by now, odds were pretty damned good they wouldn’t. If Jack were going to get out of this mess, he had to do it on his own.
For the fifth or sixth time he did a visual sweep of the warehouse. Rat droppings weren’t the only objects littering its dim, cavernous interior. A stained mattress, some moldy fast-food sacks and a scatter of rusted tin cans gave ample evidence of prior occupation. So did the syringes dropped on the concrete floor.
His glance lingered on the syringes. He’d considered those earlier but the damned things were plastic, not glass. Even if he could toe one within reach, somehow get it into his hands and break the barrel before the gorilla noticed, the plastic shard wouldn’t cut through the restraints.
He’d have to go with a rusted can. The closest was about four feet away. Its lid was jagged and bent back, as though someone had used an old-fashioned can opener to get at the contents, then tossed it aside.
He couldn’t wiggle the rickety chair that far without getting Goliath all excited. He had to take a dive. Probably more than one. He just hoped to hell he didn’t knock himself unconscious when he hit the cement floor.
“Hey! You!”
Goliath slewed a disinterested glance Jack’s way.
“I need to take a leak, too.”
Hard to pantomime without the use of your arms. He tipped his chin toward his fly. When that didn’t produce results, he nodded toward the urine-splashed wall, arced his arms behind him to clear the chair and started to push to his feet.
His guard grunted a warning. Jack ignored it. He was almost upright when the giant lunged out of his own chair and swung the beefy fist gripping his silenced semiautomatic.
The blow knocked Jack sideways. He crashed to the cement. The rickety chair went with him. Goliath said something that was obviously a warning and hooked a paw under Jack’s arm. Of course, he had to grab the one grazed by the bullet.
When Jack grimaced in pain, amusement lit Goliath’s broad, flat face. He muttered a few words that no doubt translated to “serves you right, asshole” and righted the overturned chair. He shoved Jack into it and headed back to his own.
“I have to piss.”
His jaw set, Jack started to rise again. And again, Goliath let fly with a backhanded blow. And this time, he couldn’t be bothered to right the chair or haul his hostage up into it.
Jack’s lips curled in a snarl. His eyes never left the gorilla’s. Muttering profanities that only seemed to increase the big man’s amusement, he got a grip on the rusted can he’d landed almost on top of. He maneuvered it with his fingertips until he turned the jagged lid inward. As he surreptitiously sawed at the plastic restraints, he wondered fleetingly how long it had been since his last tetanus shot. No matter. Lockjaw was the least of his worries right now. His gut told him Dominic St. Sebastian’s pals played for keeps.
* * *
He got confirmation of that just moments after the giant’s cell phone buzzed. Goliath picked up the instrument, glanced at the number displayed on the screen and hit Talk. Two grunts later, he set the phone down. A few moments after that, a door at the far end of the warehouse opened.
Still lying on his side, Jack curved his body so his front faced the door and his wrists were hidden behind his back. The damned can lid was slippery with blood from slicing into his skin, but the grim realization that it was now or never kept him razoring at the restraints.
He also kept his eyes on the three men who came through the door. One he recognized from the hotel. The second was a stranger. The third was Dominic St. Sebastian. His features seemed to freeze when he spotted the body sprawled on the concrete. Then his eyes caught Jack’s. He flashed a swift, silent message, but before Jack could interpret that damned thing, the stranger took a wide-legged stance a few yards away. He was dressed in a sleek gray suit and white wing tips. A distant corner of Jack’s mind was wondering who the hell wore wing tips anymore when a vicious smile cut across the man’s swarthy face.
“I have waited a long time for this, Ambassador.”
“That right?”
“I thought to take you in Washington, but security there is too tight. How convenient that you have a woman here in New York.”
The jagged lid took another slice out of Jack’s thumb. He couldn’t work the lid too hard with the stranger’s eyes on him, but he didn’t give up.
“Convenient for you, maybe,” he drawled. “Not so much for me. Who the hell are you, anyway?”
“I am Antonio Cordi, the brother of Francesco Cordi. Perhaps you remember him?”
“Yeah, I remember him. Hard to forget the man who tried to gun down my father.”
“And failed, unfortunately. We don’t often miss our targets.”
“‘We’ being you and the other scumbags who comprise ’Ndrangheta.”
Jack was all too familiar with the confederation of Italian families that rose to power after the Cosa Nostra’s decline in the 1990s. By forming alliances with Central and South American drug cartels, ’Ndrangheta had gone global and was now one of the world’s most powerful criminal organizations. Its members were up to their hairy armpits in drug trafficking, prostitution, extortion, weapons smuggling and kidnappings for ransom. One U.S. State Department white paper estimated that their illegal activities accounted for more than $43 billion in 2007 alone—or approximately three percent of Italy’s total gross domestic product.
Jack had gotten up close and personal with only one member of the clan, when his dad had been tapped to lead a delegation exploring the extent to which the ’Ndrangheta’s money laundering had infiltrated the international banking system. The delegation followed one of the links to Francesco Cordi. When they dug a little too deep, Cordi retaliated by going after the high-ranking members of the delegation. Two died when their car was firebombed. Jack flew to Rome as soon as he heard about it and was with his father when Cordi came after him.
He had no regrets about taking Cordi down. Not then, not now. Even though he’d been advised by several concerned Italian officials that every member of the ’Ndrangheta swore a blood oath to always, always avenge the death of one of their own.
So he wasn’t surprised when Cordi’s brother slid a hand inside the jacket of his pearl-gray suit. Or that the hand emerged holding a blue steel Beretta.
Fourteen
Gina had never been inside a military command post but she suspected they couldn’t be any more crowded or more tense than the apartment once Special Agent Driskell and her partner arrived.
With the duchess’s permission, the FBI agents commandeered the study to interview Jack’s father in private. That left Gina, her grandmother, Sarah, Dev, Zia and the obnoxious Dale Vickers to pick at the buffet lunch Maria had miraculously managed to augment with the arrival of each new wave of visitors.
Gina re-ee-eally wanted to tell Vickers to find somewhere else to squat, but the man was so worried about his friend and boss she didn’t have the heart to kick him out of their unofficial command center. Besides, he and Dev seemed to have formed an unlikely partnership.
She tried to set aside her animosity for Vickers and study the two men objectively as they sat across from her, with the remains of the buffet lunch still littering the table. Jack’s chief of staff was in an expensive-looking suit with his tie loosened and the top button of his shirt popped. Dev wore jeans and a faded, light blue denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up. With his broad shoulders, close-cropped black hair and tanned skin, he looked as if he spent more time on his parents’ New Mexico ranch than in boardrooms all around the globe. Yet anyone looking at the two men could easily pick out the power broker. Dev Hunter exuded the utter confidence that came with having built a multinational aerospace corporation from the ground up.
“Are you sure Jack had his cell phone on him when he left Washington?” he asked Vickers.
“I’m sure.”
Frowning, Dev worked the buttons of his handheld device. “It’s not emitting a signal.”
“I could have told you that,” Gina said. “Someone…”
She scrunched her forehead and ran through a mental litany of officials who’d responded to her 911 call. The NYPD detectives? The guy from the counterterrorism office? Pam Driskell? Aside from the short, stocky FBI agent, they were all pretty much a nameless, faceless blur now.
“I can’t remember who, but someone ran a trace on Jack’s cell phone within moments of showing up at the Excelsior. Maybe several someones. They said any recently manufactured cell phone has a built-in tracking device that allows eavesdroppers to pinpoint its location to within just a few feet.”
“Unless the battery is removed,” Dev muttered, playing with his gizmo. “Which must be the case here, or the ultra high frequency cargo container signal receptor we’re developing for MilSatCom would pick it up.”
“The what for the who?”
“I can’t speak to the ‘what,’” Sarah said as Dev continued to scowl at the instrument in his hand, “but the ‘who’ is the Military Satellite Communications System.”
When both the duchess and Gina turned to stare at her, she smiled at their look of astonishment. “Don’t be so surprised. I’ve been receiving a crash course on all things military since we got back from our honeymoon.”
“You’re serious?”
“As serious as the self-contained, bolt-on/bolt-off special operations surveillance system mounted in the belly of a C-130,” she said solemnly.
Gina tried, she really tried, to picture her oh-so-elegant sister in one of the retro designer classic outfits she loved clambering around the belly of a C-130. Not that Gina knew what a C-130 was, exactly.
“What about your brother?” Dev asked Zia, cutting into Gina’s wild imaginings. “Do you know Dom’s cell phone number?”
“Of course,” she said wearily. “But the police ran a trace on that, too, with no results.”
“With all due respect to our various law enforcement agencies, they don’t yet have access to the kind of technology I’m talking about here. It’s still in the developmental stage and… Well, damn! That’s it!”
Dev’s exclamation shot up the tension level among the others in the room. The women all sat up in their chairs. Vickers hunched closer as Dev whipped out his own cell phone.
“That’s what?” Vickers asked.
Shaking his head in obvious self-disgust, Dev tapped a number on his speed dial. “Why the hell didn’t I think of it before?”
“Think of what?”
“Hold on.” He put the phone to his ear. “Pat, I need the MilSat access code for the gamma version of CSR-II. I’ve been trying to get on using the beta version but… Yeah, I know. I know. Just get me the damned code.”
; “Ooooh,” Sarah murmured, her green eyes dancing, “that’s going to cost him.”
“Pat Donovan is Dev’s right-hand man,” Gina explained to a bewildered Zia. “He’s a wizard. Really, I think the man has magical powers. He can move mountains with a single phone call.”
“If not mountains, at least the occupants of an entire Parisian hotel,” Sarah recalled. “I don’t know what kind of a bonus Dev paid him for that particular trick but I have a feeling it ran to big bucks.”
“Say again,” Dev barked into the phone, his brows knit. “Right. Right. Okay, got it. What? Yeah, we’ll talk about that later.”
He disconnected and switched to his handheld device. The thing looked so innocuous. Just a small, wafer-thin box with a greenish-colored digital screen and a set of icons that appeared with the tap of a finger. It fit in the palm of Dev’s hand and could easily be mistaken for a smart phone, except this little gadget could evidently bounce signals off the moon or something.
He was entering a long involved code when the sliding doors to the study slammed back. Every head turned in surprise as Driskell’s partner raced out and made a beeline for the foyer. Driskell herself was right on his heels, with Jack’s dad staggering white-faced behind them.
The FBI agent paused only long enough to throw out a terse explanation. “We’ve got a report of shots fired. Initial indications are the situation may involve the ambassador.”
“Involve how?” Gina jumped up. The violent movement sent her chair crashing to the floor. “Agent Driskell, wait! Is Jack hurt?”
“Or my brother?” Zia demanded as she, too, surged to her feet.
“I don’t know,” the FBI agent replied on the run. “I’ll contact y’all as soon as I do.”
“I’m coming with you!”
Gina shouted to an empty space. Driskell was already out the front door, leaving a frozen tableau of tension and fear in her wake. Dev shattered the silence with an abrupt command.
“Gina, do you have Driskell’s cell phone number?”
The Diplomat's Pregnant Bride Page 15
